A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books

by Nicholas Basbanes

  Though Schomburg’s ability to travel was limited by a modest income, the scope of his collecting was not. He nurtured a correspondence with dealers throughout the United States and abroad, and he left no doubt that he was collecting materials “relating to Negroes everywhere.” And he built up a network of friends and acquaintances around the world who were constantly on the alert. For instance, a schoolteacher in Haiti who wrote Schomburg hoping to find a pen pal soon was reporting on efforts to locate Haitian material. Similarly, a pianist planning a vacation in Bermuda was asked to look there for musical scores composed by blacks. Schomburg’s good friend Alain Locke was routinely given lists of desiderata to seek out on his frequent trips to Europe, and James Weldon Johnson was asked to do the same in Central and South America. Langston Hughes found items relating to the black mother of the Russian writer Alexander Pushkin and the black Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge in the Soviet Union, and sent them on to his friend in New York. Schomburg asked the United States envoy to Liberia, the Honorable A. Lester Walton, to acquire the papers of the African educator and statesman Edward Wilmot Blyden, which Schomburg understood to be in the possession of a certain Liberian woman. “Rather than have the termites make a meal of them,” he wrote Walton in 1937, perhaps “a few” of the papers could be secured for the Schomburg collection.

  Though his collection included rare items from all over the world, Schomburg only made one trip abroad. Shortly after his collection was purchased by the New York Public Library with $10,000 provided by the Carnegie Corporation, Schomburg sailed to Spain in the summer of 1926 on the steamer Manuel Arnus. “On the eve of my departure,” he wrote a friend, “I express my sincere regards for the many years we have labored in the vineyards of usefulness to the race. I depart now on a mission of love to recapture my lost heritage.”

  Schomburg retired from Bankers Trust in 1929 at the age of fifty-nine, and promptly accepted an offer to develop a black history archive at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. He returned to New York in 1932, became curator of the collection he had sold to the New York Public Library six years earlier, and tirelessly oversaw its fortunes until his death in 1938. With some backing from the Carnegie Corporation, Schomburg enhanced the holdings and continued to seek help from his friends. There were times during those lean Depression years when he ordered books without the approval of his superiors at the New York Public Library, hoping that satisfactory arrangements somehow would be worked out later. Sometimes the library would pay, most of the time it would not, but Schomburg always scraped money together, often from his own pocket.

  Schomburg lectured widely on black heritage and culture, and though he had little formal education, he learned from his books and used what he had taught himself to write penetrating pieces for such journals and periodicals as Crisis and Opportunity. His best-known essay, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” was published in the March 1925 issue of Survey Graphic, which was devoted to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Schomburg’s article was reprinted later that year in The New Negro, an important anthology edited by Alain Locke. “History must restore what slavery took away, for it is the social damage of slavery that the present generations must repair and offset,” Schomburg wrote. “The Negro has been a man without a history because he has been considered a man without a worthy culture.”

  Charles L. Blockson was once described by his football coach at Pennsylvania State University as the kind of young man “who renews your faith in mankind.” An opposing coach equally impressed by the running back’s exemplary character said of Blockson’s prowess on the field: “Blockson just runs right over people. He doesn’t believe in being fancy.”

  During four years at Penn State, Charley “the Blockbuster” Blockson, as he was known in the 1950s, earned a varsity letter on three outstanding Nittany Lion teams, playing alongside Lenny Moore in the backfield and behind Roosevelt Grier at tackle. Their record for 1953–1955 was 21–9. As a college track star, Blockson threw the shot put and the discus; earlier competing for Norristown High School in Pennsylvania, he also ran the half mile, 440 relay, and 880 relay. “I would have considered the decathlon,” Blockson said years later as he was flipping through some of his old scrapbooks, “but I couldn’t do very much with the pole vault.”

  In 1956, after accepting an invitation to try out with the New York Giants, Blockson received a firm offer to join the team but declined. After close to forty years, the contract remains in his personal files, unsigned. “It really wasn’t that hard a decision for me to make. I love athletics and I respect what they did for me. But I knew there were other things I could do with my life. I gave my body to sports from the time I was in junior high school. I wanted to keep my mind for myself.”

  As most sports fans know, Lenny Moore and Rosey Grier went on to standout professional careers. Pro Football Hall of Fame running back Moore recalled being “shocked” when he heard that his 6-foot-3, 215-pound college teammate had “walked away” from that offer. Moore was just beginning his own career with the Baltimore Colts, and remembers getting a telephone call from Roosevelt Grier, who had made the Giants squad a year earlier. “Charles and I go all the way back to high school,” Moore said. “I played for Reading and he played for Norristown, and he was without question the best athlete in the state of Pennsylvania, and he did everything. Take a look at his track stats, you’ll see what I mean. He was so much bigger than everyone else, he didn’t have to worry about going around anyone. When he ran into you, it was like getting popped by a linebacker.”

  Moore said that after being rivals in high school, he and Blockson became close friends and roommates during their freshman year at Penn State. “When Rosey told me Charles had left the Giants training camp, I couldn’t believe my ears. Rosey said Charles had the team made, but he just walked away from it. You don’t find many black kids who would turn their backs on a career in pro sports, then or now. We had very few black heroes to look up to in those days, and if you wanted to advance, you took your first shot, if you were fortunate enough to get one.”

  What Lenny Moore did not know then, but what he learned many years later, was that what his friend wanted most of all was to become a “black bibliophile.” In 1984, the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection of twenty thousand books, pamphlets, prints, manuscripts, narratives, posters, photographs, sheet music, and broadsides was dedicated at Temple University in Philadelphia, rich testimony that he succeeded admirably in that pursuit. Under Blockson’s determined direction, the collection’s holdings quadrupled to more than eighty thousand items ten years later.

  “The most important element in the Charles Blockson Collection is Charles Blockson himself,” Peter J. Liacouras, president of Temple University, said categorically in an interview. When the material was presented to the university, the understanding was that the man who had assembled it would come along as curator. Equally important was that he would have a free hand in directing its continued growth, and that he serve as the university’s link to the scholarly community on ways to use the material most effectively.

  “The beauty of Charles is that he crosses all demographic boundaries,” Liacouras said. “He relates beautifully with scholars, teachers, students, children at all levels of sophistication. That is one of the reasons I placed his collection right here with me in the most prestigious building in the university. I did not want him to be isolated over in special collections because his appeal goes beyond scholarship, and it is contagious. He came to Temple at a time when we were trying to assert ourselves as a university that serves all the people. Children can come into the same building that houses the president of the university and study their antecedents with Charles Blockson right by their side.”

  Liacouras explained that the Blockson Collection is something that a professional staff would never assemble on its own initiative. “Building an institutional collection is a lot like getting approval for a research project. The most funded programs require peer review, so you don’t t
ake tremendous risks, you play it safe. It is the people who are free from that sort of process who develop the most novel resources. It’s no secret that mavericks are the innovators of society. Charles is not a businessperson or a professional scholar; he is an artist and a collector. My job is to give him a lot of freedom and allow him to flourish.”

  Blockson told me that the collection “is an extension of my soul,” and emphasized that it has provided the raw source material for his own writing, which includes many magazine articles and seven books. Pennsylvania’s Black History was published in 1975, followed in 1977 by Black Genealogy, now recognized as an essential reference for African-Americans interested in finding their roots. In July of 1984, National Geographic magazine devoted thirty-six pages to Blockson’s essay “Escape from Slavery: The Underground Railroad” and featured it on the cover. Three years later, Blockson’s expanded work on the subject, The Underground Railroad, presented first-person narratives of former slaves who had escaped bondage. These projects were inspired by stories Blockson had heard as a child about his great-grandfather’s flight to freedom in 1856.

  The oldest of nine children, Blockson said he remembers listening in awe as his grandfather told how his father, James Blockson, ran away from servitude in Delaware and fled to Canada, and how he and “tens of thousands of other black slaves who fled north along its invisible rails and hid in its clandestine stations in the years before the Civil War” kept the secrets of the Underground Railroad “locked in his heart until he died.” Blockson credited these family stories with inspiring him “at an early age to begin collecting information on Afro-Americans in general and the Underground Railroad in particular.”

  The decision to become not just a writer but a bibliophile of black history and literature was reinforced by yet another childhood experience, one that Blockson related without rancor, but offered as further explanation for the forces that drove him to gather the chronicles of his ancestors. “When I was eight years old and in the fourth grade, I asked my teacher if negroes have a history,” he said. “There were maybe three black faces in the class then, and that’s exactly what I said: ‘Do negroes have a history of their own?’ I knew of course about Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, and Jesse Owens and Paul Robeson were my idols, but aside from those obvious exceptions, it always seemed as though black people had never participated in the making of America. ‘No,’ she answered. ‘Negroes have no history. They were born to serve white people.’ ”

  The timing was coincidental, but exactly fifty years later, in 1991, the city of Norristown honored Charles L. Blockson with an Appreciation Day that included proclamations from the mayor, governor, both houses of the state legislature, and the Philadelphia City Council. By then, this driven bibliophile also had received honorary degrees from Villanova and Lincoln Universities, and he was constantly being asked to lecture on black history. Yet for all this recognition, Blockson said one of the most meaningful tributes he has received came when his former teacher, by then retired, sought him out and apologized for her thoughtless words of long ago. “Charles, you have taught us all something about ourselves and our place in history,” the woman told him.

  “I assured her I was never angry with her, because she only said what she had been taught,” Blockson said. “I did not believe there had ever been any malice. She just didn’t know any better. But looking back, I have to say I was stunned by what she said, and I was embarrassed. More than that, I was confused, because I knew about my grandfather, and I knew there were thousands of other people just like him. She was telling me they passed on no history? They had no background? No culture? It became very important for me to prove that what she said was false. That is when the collector in me was born, I think, that day in the fourth grade. I was a collector before I ever knew I was a collector.”

  Blockson began going to church bazaars, rummage sales, thrift shops, and used-book stores. “I picked up things that nobody was interested in. I have books in the collection today that I found before I ever got to high school, good things, too, things that cost me no more than a few pennies each.” Fruitful sources were Salvation Army and Goodwill stores. “They had books for ten cents each. There were times when I buried books I wanted beneath others and waited until they had their half-price sales.”

  The youthful collector began with a simple focus. Any items that mentioned the words black, Negro, African, or colored were singled out and marked for acquisition. Among those early finds were two books by Carter G. Woodson—the author of several studies of black accomplishment and the originator of African-American History Month—Negro Makers of History, 1945, and African Heroes and Heroines, 1939, which provided an early refutation of the teacher’s remarks. By the time he got to Penn State in 1953, Blockson had been acquiring material for ten years and had become more sophisticated in his quest. “The first thing Lenny and Rosey would do whenever we went somewhere for a road game was go check out the sorority houses. I always started out at the used-book stores, even if I didn’t buy anything. Just being among books was therapy enough for me.”

  While in New York City for a Madison Square Garden track meet, Blockson decided to spend some free time one afternoon in Upper Manhattan. “I took the ‘A’ Train to Harlem,” he said melodically, and hummed a few off-key notes from Duke Ellington’s famous theme song of the same name. “I got off at the One Hundred Thirty-fifth Street Station, went over to the Schomburg Center on Lenox Avenue, and walked into what I knew right away was the most important moment of my life. I looked around and I discovered that I wasn’t alone. I saw what another black man had done, and what Arthur Schomburg had done became my model. I had found my purpose in life. And I have never looked back.” In time Charles Blockson would be described as a modern-day Arthur Alfonso Schomburg; like Schomburg, he not only would entrust his cherished collection to a repository, but also would personally guide people in search of knowledge along its many pathways.

  After spending two years in the Army, Blockson returned to Norristown in 1958 and started a janitorial business. “I made an adequate income,” he said. “But my mind was on collecting, collecting, collecting.” In 1970, he was appointed specialist in human relations and cultural affairs for the Norristown Area School District, an ideal position for a man whose goal in life was to promote pride and understanding among younger people. He taught ethnic and local history, conducted seminars and workshops for teachers, and acted as a liaison between the schools and the community. Meanwhile, he began to use the material he had been gathering for most of his life to write about black genealogy and history.

  Blockson said he has a saying that he uses frequently in his lectures: “The hand that holds the pen, the quill, and the pencil controls history,” and he quickly pointed out that when he was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, “the people who controlled the pens and the pencils did not present a proper history of African-Americans.” But then, he added, “it wasn’t so long before that when teaching slaves how to read was a criminal offense. It was against the law for black people to read. They were denied the right to learn anything about their history and their heritage. So it should come as no surprise that blacks used to be ashamed of their color.”

  Lenny Moore and Charles Blockson have remained close through five decades and keep tabs on each other’s fortunes. “There are so many things I could say about Charles,” Moore told me. “What stands out is how he was always more focused than the rest of us. I thought he was crazy when he left the Giants camp, but I didn’t know what he had in mind for his life. The amazing thing is that he knew so much earlier than any of us what he wanted to accomplish. I’m very fortunate that we have known each other all these years, because I love the man. I’m proud to call him my friend.”

  Fred J. Board of Stamford, Connecticut, has a house full of books, some devoted to individual authors, others to themes; some are fine-press books, thousands are miniatures no larger than a matchbook, hundreds are guidebooks published by the
Federal Writers Project during the Depression. He has books shaped like circles, books printed on purple paper, one held together with steel bolts, another made of concrete. He has a book that moos like a cow, another that pulls open like an accordion.

  “This one here is actually pretty rare,” he said while showing me through his various collections. “It’s French; it was made in 1799, and it’s called a ‘dos-à-dos’ book, back-to-back. See. Three covers.” He also has a tête-à-tête book, which allows two people to read the same volume while seated and facing each other, and another called an “upside-down” book, with two short stories printed on opposite pages, one aligned top to bottom, the other bottom to top. “Every time I open this one, I hope I don’t see moths flying out,” he said, and handed over a beautiful volume printed on Scottish woolen tartan. “Some people worry about book worms,” he continued, picking up a book printed on large strips of pasta. “This one will probably get eaten by mice.”

  Board has many unusual book collections, but he keeps the ones that got him started fifty years ago in a small office on the first floor of the house. Several shelves there are devoted entirely to lakes—Huron, Superior, Winnipesaukee, Great Salt, and the like. “The rivers are over here, the mountains are over there,” he said. “Up on top is my Frank Stockton collection. I have every darn thing the guy ever wrote except one obscure little pamphlet called Northern Voice Toward Dissolution of the Union that I’m never going to find. It took me five years to buy the Cracker Jack company, and I’ve spent fifty years on Frank Stockton, and I haven’t completed him yet.”